The Wessex Hillforts & Habitats Project

Early morning last week…a drone took off over Hambledon after light snow. Perfect conditions, the snowflakes had settled into the valleys of the great encircling hillfort ditches… and streets of round house platforms became visible as rows of hollows outlined in white.

Hambledon Hill light snow shows the dimples where Iron Age round houses once stood.

These photos help illustrate the majesty and awe of this vast archaeological site and has helped us launch the National Trust’s Wessex Hillforts and Habitats project. With the help of Marie, our project officer, the People’s Postcode Lottery have granted over 100,000 pounds to get the project started.

The primary purpose of the project is to enhance the conservation of 13 NT Iron Age hillforts scattered across Dorset and South Wiltshire …but it will also inspire people to get involved and to carry out monitoring and research. It will also create new interpretation to bring these grassy hill top earthworks to life as places to be appreciated, valued and better understood. Alongside this.. to highlight nature, particularly the plant and insect life. Each hillfort’s unique topography nurtures precious habitat undisturbed by agriculture for over 2000 years.

Purple spotted orchids growing on the sheltered slopes of a hillfort ditch

So.. where are these places. I’ll list them out for you…. and as some have featured in previous blog posts I’ll reference these while we have a quick tour.

We’ll start in Wiltshire and from there head south and west and eventually end at the Devon border.

Figsbury Ring, north-east of Salisbury. A circular rampart and ditch with a view back to the great cathedral spire. Strangely, Figsbury has a wide deep ditch within the hillfort ..potentially Neolithic but there is no rampart.. where did all the chalk go?

Figsbury Ring from its rampart top showing the wide deep ditch inside the hillfort.

South of Salisbury, Wick Ball Camp above Philipps House, Dinton.. NT only owns the outer rampart.

Then there is the icon of Warminster, Cley Hill (blog posts “Upon Cley Hill’; Upon Cley Hill 2”), a flying saucer shaped chalk outlier with two round barrows on the summit..a strange hillfort.

To the south west, at the source of the mighty River Stour, is the Stourhead Estate with its two hillforts. These are Park Hill Camp, its views hidden by conifer plantation and Whitesheet Hill  (blog Whitesheet Hill Open at the Close) with wide prospects across the Blackmore Vale towards Hambledon and Hod. We’ll follow the Stour to reach them.

Hod is the largest true hillfort in Dorset, the geophysics has shown it full of round houses…a proto town… and there are the clear earthworks of the Roman 1st century fort in Hod’s north-west corner (blog post Hod Hill Camp Bastion)

Hambledon is close by, just across a dry valley, perched high on a ridge, surrounded by the Neolithic, you feel like you’re flying when standing there. (blog post Archaeology SW day 2014, Hambledon Sunset)

Follow the Stour further south and you reach the triple ramparts and ditches of Badbury Rings on the Kingston Lacy Estate. From here you can see the chalk cliffs of the Isle of Wight (blog post Badbury and the Devil’s footprint)

Now from Badbury take the Roman road west to Dorchester and keep going beyond the county town, glancing at Maiden Castle as you pass(Duchy of Cornwall, English Heritage).

The Roman road continues straight towards Bridport but branches from the A35 road before you reach the village of Winterbourne Abbas.

It has now become a minor road.. a couple of miles on… it branches again..still straight but this once arterial Roman route to Exeter has dwindled to a narrow trackway with grass sprouting from the tarmac.

Don’t lose heart…keep going…and you will break out onto the chalkland edge and the multiple ramparts of Eggardon Hill.

From Eggardon, the other hillforts emerge as sentinals ringing the high ground overlooking the Marshwood Vale, and, to the south, the cliffs of Golden Cap.. and beyond, the sweep of Lyme Bay and the English Channel.

Winter woods at Coney’s Castle

Next to the west is Lewesdon Hill, a small fort but occupying the highest land in Dorset, nearby is the second highest, the flat top of Pilsdon Pen, surrounded by double ramparts and enclosing Iron Age round houses, Bronze Age round barrows and the pillow mounds of  the medieval rabbit warren.

The last two in the Project guard a gap through the Upper Greensand ridge at the Devon border. Coney’s Castle has a minor road running through it and on its south side are wonderful twisted moss covered oaks… and beneath them the deep blue of bluebells in the Spring. Lambert’s Castle was used as a fair up to the mid 20th century, remains of the fair house and animal pens can be seen there ….but once again the views are spectacular, particularly in early morning after frost with the mist rising from the lowland.

Lambert’ s Castle after frost.

A baker’s dozen of hillforts of the 59 the NT looks after in the South West.

One might imagine that these huge works of humanity look after themselves… but they need to be cared for.. we must have farmers willing to graze the right number and type of stock on them….at the right times;  NT rangers and volunteers to cut regenerating scrub and fix fencing and gates…

If not, these nationally important scheduled monuments and SSSIs will deteriorate. The earthworks will become overgrown and grassland habitat will be lost, archaeological knowledge locked in the layers beneath the soil will become disrupted… and the views into the landscape and across and within the hillforts will become hidden.

The Wessex Hillforts and Habitats Project promises to be an exciting time of conservation and discovery. The work has now begun!

Badbury and the Devil’s Footprint

This is about the 6th century… Dark Times.

You will need to go to Badbury Rings in Dorset and head to the west side of the outer rampart. Stand where the great Roman road, known as the Ackling Dyke, touches the hillfort and then look north.

From the Badbury Roman cross-roads take the road to Old Sarum (nr Salsibury) where there is another hillfort at another cross-roads. After the Roman conquest, just like at Badbury, a small Roman town grew up nearby. At Badbury it’s Shapwick (Vindocladia) at Old Sarum its Stratford sub Castle (Sorviodunum).

The Roman administration lasted about 400 years then the troops left for the continent and Britain sorted out its own politics. It broke up into factions, petty political infighting and one by one these new Romanised British states caved in to alien cultures from outside the old empire. Our modern counties tell the story of conflict and the place names of our villages and towns in the east are almost exclusively Anglo-Saxon. Bit by bit the Roman centres were abandoned or taken over. In recent years it has been suggested that British and Germanic incomers integrated more amicably than has traditionally been believed…but ancient DNA compared with DNA from modern populations argues for the old fashioned view …that the Brits were ethnically cleansed from the east.

The Saxons took Old Sarum in AD 552, their history book, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, states this. A worrying time for the Romanised peoples of Dorset and Somerset. Time to block the Ackling Dyke. It was too easy an access route for the invaders. The old earthwork marking the Dorset border, Bockerley Dyke, was strengthened and the road was blocked here (General Pitt Rivers discovered this during his excavations in 1890). It was re-opened again soon afterwards…

Early aerial photograph of Badbury Rings (Wessex from the Air 1928). The Ackling Dyke runs top centre to centre left. Notice the way the outer rampart touches the road and covers its south eastern bank and ditch. The Devil’s Footprint is top centre cutting the road at right angles. The line has subsequently been rebuilt but over the years has slumped into the old cutting.

Badbury at the cross-roads needed re-fortification. Imagine standing here in the 6th century.. can you feel the vulnerability. What happened?

There are three ramparts around the hillfort. The two inner ones lie close together and look similar…they are Iron Age. What about the outer one? It is further out, slighter, bit humpy…unfinished?. Some say it was built about AD 44 ..on the eve of the Roman Conquest, but stand on the west edge where it runs beside the Ackling Dyke and look at the earthworks.

Which came first? The great Ackling Dyke is 25m across. Late Roman banks and ditches flank the road on either side. Recent LiDAR laser scans, along with aerial photographs, show something new. The east road bank is cut by Badbury’s outer ditch. Excavation at Shapwick has shown that the road is late 4th century…so Badbury’s rampart is later still. Last week I visited and saw it on the ground.

Then there is the chalk quarry just a little to the north.. known as the Devil’s Footprint. It runs from the rampart across the line of the road to the steeper slope to the west. Once it was covered in gorse but NT rangers have now made the earthwork clearly visible and it is not a random digging. It cuts the Ackling Dyke at a right angle. A wide formidable defence acting as a cross-ridge dyke.

Back in 2004, we radiocarbon dated the re-occupation of the hillfort to the 5th century, so good evidence that Badbury’s people re-made this place as a fortress. The British Dorset militia quickly threw up Badbury’s outer rampart and dug the wide trench, the ‘Devil’s Footprint’,to hold back the Saxon tide…. well..now..as the archaeology of the earthworks has demonstrated, there’s a strong argument to be made for this.

Boundaries & Hedges: Look Deeper

Look into this photo…look deep into this photo.

What do you see?

Yes, I know.. it’s just a bit of farmland.

Look deeper…there’s at least 4000 years of farmland here.
Look at the hedgerows….they’re very precious …on a European scale, our bushy boundaries are surprisingly rare and wonderful for wildlife.

Off to the left is the edge of Badbury Rings.. so we’re on the Kingston Lacy Estate in Dorset again.

Kingston Lacy for me is like Miss Marple’s village.

We are on the south side of the grand Beech Avenue. William John Bankes had this planted for his mother in 1835.

This land has been ploughed for many generations. Bottom centre, there’s a dark circle with a black blob in it.

The ploughing has levelled an Early Bronze Age burial mound and all that is left is the cut of the quarry ditch. From here the chalk was dug to heap up the bright white mound over the grave. Perhaps the body is still in the grave pit marked by the blob.

The Round Barrow was once an eye-catcher. About 1000BC the land was divided into units by linear boundary ditches. Perhaps population was rising. Boundaries needed to be clear and well defined. The barrow mound formed a good fixed point and the boundary runs against it.

Look again. This linear boundary does not follow a straight line. It has to weave between existing fields. Can you see the white ghost lines of the chalk field banks it has to negotiate. These are small ‘celtic’ fields, in use from the Bronze Age through to the Roman period and later.

Many hedge and wall field systems in the west still follow boundaries as old as this.

Nothing is completely static.

Look up to the centre right and see a group of dark-lined enclosure ditches overlying the ghosts. I walked there with the farmer once and recovered scraps of Roman pottery from the new ploughed field. Stock enclosures, Roman development over part of the old system.

Zoom out a little… can you see broad bands of darker and lighter stripes running roughly with the hedgerows?..

These are the remains of the furlongs and strips of Shapwick’s common arable field system. A time of centralisation when scattered farmsteads and fields became concentrated. Devised by the Saxons, around the 10th century, communities farmed their scattered strips within the great fields, managed by the lord’s manorial court.

At Kingston Lacy, this system continued right down to the 19th century. We have a great map showing all the strip fields in 1773-4, it tells us who farmed what.The small guys were being squeezed out by the larger farmers.

How old fashioned! This was the advice of William Woodward, the surveyor, who advised the Bankes family to enclose the land. In 1813, a new map was made and the land was divided up into large economic farms with straight hedge boundaries. The smallholders became farm labourers.

Look into this photograph. Look deep into this photograph. We are east of Badbury now. Towards Kingston Lacy Park.

Bottom left is the tree-edged enclosure of Lodge Farm. All the names in the landscape matter. It’s ‘lodge’ after the medieval hunting lodge.

The stone lodge itself now has a lawn in front of it. A 15th century building on the site of an earlier building at the gateway to the royal deer park and warren of Badbury. This park is documented right back to Henry de Lacy’s time in the 13th century.

Top, right of Badbury, is the medieval High Wood, and middle right is a hedgerow strip marking the deep survival of the broad medieval deer park ditch. Designed for fallow deer to leap in but not get out. Deer were valued for their high status meat, a preserve of the rich carefully nurtured and guarded.

Badbury Warren was maintained right up to bachelor John Bankes’ day. There were complaints that the thousands of rabbits kept there, got out into the corn and coppices and damaged the crops.

John’s mum Margaret always kept the accounts and when John took over the Estate he followed her example….right up to 1740, when he closed the account book and left a few sheets of paper there.

One of these contained the inked in costs of enclosing the Warren. All the hedges in this photo were planted at this time. Their names give away the old use of this new farmland…’Lodge Field’, ‘Deer Hill Field’, ‘Hare Run Field’ and ..

‘Watch House Field’ (watching for poachers? a dangerous job, one of the medieval keepers Henry Warren was murdered…)

Sometimes… in the right conditions…. the Roman road from Poole on the coast to Badbury can be seen running from Lodge Farm across the fields.. aiming for the saddle of land between the hills of Badbury and High Wood.

Not in this photograph though..

each year brings new conditions of ploughing, drought, snow and frost and …new revelations of the past become possible…

Look into this photograph…north of Badbury now…what can you see?

The spaghetti junction of Roman Dorset! We’re looking down the barrel of the late 4th century road from Old Sarum (Salisbury), the London Road, to the civitas captital of Dorchester (still Dorset’s county town).

This late road crosses two, perhaps three earlier roads. The Poole road turns in the middle left of the photo and splits.

First joining the field boundary running to bottom centre (the road to London).

Second crossing the centre of the field, under the Dorchester road, and continuing to Bath and….

Third.. following the straight, thick hedge boundary between Badbury and the arable fields. Another road, long forgotten, heading for the Somerset Roman town of Ilchester.

This boundary, preserved and managed over the centuries.. ancient, ancient boundary held in the landscape as a hedge…once a Roman road.. it became a convenient straight marker in the 12th century to divide off  the new manor of Shapwick from the royal manor of Wimborne Minster…

and today it remains the parish boundary between the St Batholomew’s Church of Shapwick  and St Stephen’s of Pamphill.

Everything in the landscape speaks. Ancient public footpaths, names of fields, woodlands, coppices…all  full of stories and ….hedgerows are particularly precious and vulnerable…

 

 

 

 

Back to Badbury

Reconstruction drawing of Badbury Rings, Dorset by Liz Induni for the National Trust

Yesterday I met Radio Solent’s Steve Harris in the car park at Badbury Ring, on the Kingston Lacy estate, near Wimbourne, one of Dorset’s many Iron Age hill forts. We headed towards the large banks and ditches of the fort as the nippy wind blew across the fields to cool our faces. As we walked across the Roman road and stopped to look at the Bronze Age burial mounds a Skylark rose into the air singing its soaring song.

Steve Harris with Badbury Rings behind him

Steve wanted to talk about the hill fort for one of his regular features on his show. He hadn’t visited the hill fort for a very long time so this was my que to show off all the wonderful archaeology under our feet. There are almost too many stories to tell, across the thousands of years of human activity in the area.

Excavating the ditch of an Iron Age round house, just inside the inner bank of Badbury Rings

Apart from the obvious ‘humps and bumps’ of the Bronze Age barrows, Iron Age hill fort and Roman road, we have found evidence of the earlier use of the high ground the hill fort is on. When we excavated on he very top of the interior of the hill fort we found flint tools from both Mesolithic and Neolithic times.

One of the trenches in the interior of Badbury Rings hill fort. Each white tag is a worked flint or waste flake

As Steve and I reached the summit of the hill we found evidence of a more modern use of the site, large concrete blocks with iron loops in the top. These were the remnants of fixings for a timber beacon tower which emitted a signal to guide planes back to Tarrant Rushton airfield a few fields to the west during WWII.

Next to one of these blocks we finished the interview and looked out across the landscape, cars traveling along the road between the avenue of Beech trees, people walking their dogs, children running along the banks, birds chattering and the memories of our excavations came flooding back to me. Was it really 12 years since we were here, finding a clay sling shot, part of a small twisted iron torc, and beautiful worked flint tools. I will return when the many and varied wild flowers are in bloom, so long Badbury,  till we meet again.

A very happy archaeologist in a trench at Badbury Rings with a large sherd of Iron Age pottery

Shapwick’s Roman Fort, Kingston Lacy

This is the view along the Shapwick Road across our field towards Badbury Rings.

Let’s walk across a Dorset field. It’s a good one.. and although we’ll stay in the same space we will be hopping about in time a bit. Well- we’re archaeologists after all.

For the moment it’s late summer, the corn’s been cut and as we leave the far hedge and walk diagonally towards the road our boots crunch on the stubble. Keep your eyes down, there are all sorts of things beneath our feet.

Yes. There. See it ? Sticking out of that tractor rut a black chunk of pottery. Pick it up.

On the upper edge it’s polished but on the rougher zone below you have that typical cross-hatch pattern. Iron Age? Roman?

I call this the ‘Long Field’. Not its old name.. but definitely very large and long. You’d notice that if you divided it up and surveyed it. There’s Geoff, laying out the grid, walking up and down with the magnetometer. He was the first man to map the archaeology here. I walked with him some days fixing the pegs, positioning the lines. We walked miles.. but the results were spectacular. Thanks Geoff.

The field is bottom left. This is Geoff’s magnetometer survey showing the fort in detail and the underlying Iron Age settlement. If you look carefully you can see the parallel side ditches of the Badbury to Dorchester Roman road. Our walk is from fort entrance to fort entrance. From middle right to bottom left.

You almost missed that. An orange samian base fragment. It has that silk sheen to it. Unlucky, the potter’s stamp is fractured at the edge and we can’t quite read who made it. Came all the way from Gaul though.

We’re approaching a large’L’-shaped trench. Ian’s in a ‘bee-hive pit, narrow at the neck and twice the width at the bottom. It’s cool down there. He hands up something like samian except it’s ruby-coloured. An earlier pottery.. dates this grain storage pit to the Late Iron Age- 2000 years ago.

At the other end of the trench is Martin..he’s in a large pit. No, he’s gone,
someone’s placing a dog in the pit on top of a piglet. The field’s disappeared.. there are circular houses all around us, a hub-bub of people livestock and wooden fences within a settlement stockade.

Gone again.. the place is blacksmith’s workshop, furnaces and hearths. These guys look Roman.. at least the pots are 3rd century style.

From scaffold tower to scaffold tower. Looking towards the trench to locate the SW entrance of the fort.

We’re in the field heading to another larger longer trench with a scaffold tower beside it. This is the main highway, the Roman road from Badbury to Dorchester but we are also in the middle of a large Roman fort.

It was first seen on aerial photos in 1976, three concentric ditches with rounded corners. The first idea was that it was 1st century.. built on top of the Iron Age settlement right after the Roman Conquest of AD 43-44. Very different to the Roman fort at Hod Hill a few miles away though. It has only two entrances, one in the NE corner and one in the SW… and the ditches at the corners don’t quite match.

Let’s climb the scaffold tower and look down at the trench. We’ve put it at the SW entrance. We can see the three ends of the ditches in plan. The road metalling has sunk into the soft ditch filling so it has not been ploughed away.

The fort SW entrance from the scaffold tower. The outer ditch terminal is clear with remains of road metalling crushed into its surface. The middle and deep inner ditch have not yet been excavated. Most of the upper layers including the road have been ploughed away over hundreds of years. This land was part of the Shapwick common fields in the medieval period.

Gerald, Becki and Rob, if you could just remove the upper layers..yes, there are the ditches filled with pottery, animal bone and the occasional coin. It seems to date mostly to the end of the 2nd century. The outer two ditches are only a metre deep but the inner one is massive.. over 4m deep. Strange, some of the finds are 4th century.

Here it is..white chalk ramparts with a timber wall along the crest of the innermost defence. Inside it is full of rectangular buildings. Curious, the Dorchester road is blocked by the fort gates guarded by soldiers. They’re checking all the traffic. The Saxon raids along the coast have increased in recent months and this place, Vindocladia, is vulnerable. They haven’t the resources to build stone walls like those at Durnovaria (Dorchester). This secure place, the burgus fort, will have to do the job. A place of last resort for the Romanised Brits. Tense times.

Lets climb down from the scaffold and get into the car. I hope you enjoyed my favourite field. Nancy climbs in beside us. “How was it for you”…. “The earth moved”.. it certainly did.. and there was so much in it!

Kingston Lacy’s Roman Amphitheatre

Old John Bankes died back in 1772 and as he wasn’t married his younger brother Henry inherited. Henry only lived another 4 years but he did something remarkable. He commissioned a cutting edge surveyor called William Woodward to make a detailed record of his Kingston Lacy and Corfe Castle Estates in Dorset. This week Francesca kindly digitally photographed the whole survey.

The archive room at Kingston Lacy House. Until the 1980s the Bankes family archive including Willliam Woodward’s survey was stored in the mansion and few people had seen it

Yesterday, I sat in the conference room in Warminster and saw a remarkable aerial and lidar survey of Brownsea Island. The surveyor did whizzy things on the computer and zoomed into and enhanced images, measuring any detail on command. Things have come a long way since the 18th century but Woodward’s surveys are still accurate and detailed and also works of art.

One can imagine Mr Woodward arriving at Kingston Lacy House in 1775 and being shown into the library to meet his important client, Henry Bankes, surrounded by the portraits of his ancestors. The surveyor would have placed the books on the desk and explained the conclusions of his work. The money that could be made by enclosing the common arable fields and creating compact farming units….

This is Woodward’s fold-out front map which shows all the land of the Kingston Lacy Estate each lettered compartment has a detailed map within the leather bound survey book.

And there the books stayed through generations of the Bankes family gathering dust in the archive cupboard until 1982 when the Bankes family estates were given to the National Trust.

I was given the job of creating a very different survey. To audit with management recommendations all the archaeological sites I could find on NTs newly acquired Kingston Lacy Estate. Woodward’s survey was the oldest detailed map of the land so I went to its new home in the Dorset Records Office in Dorchester.. to take a look.

Wow! Historic maps are wonderful. There was so much information…There was Badbury Rings hillfort… there were the three barrows clearly visible as they are today beside the entrance track… and there was the Roman Amphitheatre..Roman Amphitheatre?

A detail of the front map. Badbury Rings hillfort.. three mounds which are Bronze Age barrows… Roman Amphitheatre!!?

What was William thinking of? Things ‘classical’, Roman and Greek, were very fashionable in his day. What had he seen to make such a mistake? The only known amphitheare in Dorset is in Dorchester, the local administrative centre then as it still is today… I had to go and have a look on the ground.

The ‘amphitheatre’ when I first saw it under stubble. The ranging poles stand on opposite sides of the 60m diameter enclosure which has a hollowed area at the centre.

I peered over the gate into a wheat field, there was certainly an earthwork. A ploughed down circular enclosure with a dip in the middle about 60m across. I asked the farmer and he said he thought it had been caused by a German bomb in WWII. That didn’t work, Woodward had seen it before it was ploughed over 230 years ago, it must have been an impressive earthwork then.

The site lay right next to the Roman road to Dorchester. Woodward shows the ‘amphitheatre’ entrance facing the road. Where was the town or settlement or Roman fort which would justify such a building (this was before we discovered the Roman settlement a few hundred metres to the south…see the blog post on Vindocladia)

A photo of the ‘amphitheatre’ taken from a model airplane after ploughing. The white mark is the chalk bank and the darker line the outer ditch. An earlier field boundary ditch emerges from below the chalk bank at the bottom of the picture.

David the warden asked a volunteer to send up a camera mounted on a model plane so that it could take aerial photographs after ploughing. Later, we walked across the site picking up prehistoric flint and the odd piece of Roman pot. The whole thing looked promising. This was a rare puzzle.. so Tim the managing agent and the farmer gave us permission to put in two trenches where the enclosure bank was crossed by the hedge.

We laid out a trench on either side of the ploughed down earthwork against the hedge beside the road down to Shapwick. Badbury lies beyond the Beech Avenue trees at the top of the picture. The ranging rod lies beside the outer ditch where a Roman spiral ring and a 3rd century coin were found in its filling.

We found that a ditch had been dug and the chalk bedrock had been heaped up to form a once massive circular enclosure bank. Over the following centuries the ditch had gradually silted up. In the filling we found a lump of Roman roof tile, then a spiral bronze ring and a 3rd century Roman coin. Perhaps it was an amphitheatre after all.

Then we realised that there had been an inner ditch but it had been backfilled almost immediately. Within the chalky fill were lumps of bone and thick black pottery. We were surprised when our trowels touched bone, then a whole skeleton was carefully uncovered at the bottom of the ditch. It turned out to be the the well preserved remains of a young pregnant cow. This was not the only animal burial we found, we also uncovered two sheep buried in pits within the enclosure (just in our narrow trenches..were there lots of burials hidden across he site?). We waited for the Radiocarbon dates to come back. When they arrived they dated the site to long before the Roman period. The animals had been buried in the period 1100-900 BC, the time when King David and later King Solomon ruled Israel.

The outer ditch had silted gradually of the centuries but the inner ditch had been dug out and backfilled soon afterwards leaving the body of a young pregnant cow in the bottom.

Over 1500 years ago, did the local Romano-British community regularly gather here to watch fights, contests and entertainments? If this was an amphitheatre it was like Maumbury Rings, Dorchester and had been adapted from an earlier earthwork. The Kingston Lacy amphitheatre started life as a Late Bronze Age sacred site complete with valuable livestock offered as sacrifices to whatever gods were worshipped at the time.

An important site. The farmer kindly agreed to conserve it and took this area out of the plough. It has remained a small pasture field ever since. The earthwork is clear to see now, covered in grass rather than stubble. Thanks for the information Mr Woodward.

The Conquest of Badbury Rings

The National Trust looks after about 50 hillforts and promontory forts in the south west.

Archaeologists don’t agree about what they were used for (they don’t tend to agree).

Status symbol for a local celeb? Sacred centre? Administrative hub? Market? Defended settlement? Wealth storage vault? Prison? All of the above?

Over the 500 years or so hillforts were in vogue, I like to think that their role fluctuated over time. In Dorset, I’m pretty sure that the impressive fortresses within the county usually fulfilled their traditionally believed role, as a place people could live in securely, particularly in dangerous times. Digging deep ditches and building massive ramparts with primitive tools would take a long time and surely not something to be done unless there was a real need.

Reconstruction drawing of Badbury Rings, Dorset by Liz Induni for the National Trust

Badbury Rings in Dorset is the highest hill in the area. There are good views out in all directions, surrounded by three concentric rings of banks and ditches. Apart from these massive earthworks what other evidence might be found to suggest it had a defensive function, a place that may have witnessed conflict.

Finds of weapons and projectiles would help. Over the years there have been stories of finds.

About 200 years ago someone ploughed up a leaf-shaped bronze sword in a field on the west side of Badbury and one of the National Trust rangers found a bronze axe in a drainage trench in 1990. These are about 3000 years old and show that Badbury hill was important before the Iron Age.

Late Bronze Age palstave axe which fell out of the side of a drainage ditch south-west of Badbury.

I have often wondered what happened at Badbury during the Roman Conquest. Did the local people strengthen the hillfort against Roman attack. The native people of Dorset are thought to have been known as the Durotriges and they refused to surrender their land to the Romans without a fight. After defeating the more powerful tribes in the south-east, the future emperor Vespasian was sent with the Second Legion Augusta to mop up the west.

2005 Excavating a drip gulley dug around a round house built within Badbury Rings about 2000 years ago.

His soldiers conquered the Isle of Wight, defeated two warlike tribes and captured 20 fortified settlements. The fleet entered Poole Harbour and a military supply depot was established at Hamworthy. A road was built north up to the River Stour and a half legionary fortress was built. It was discovered in the 1960s and would have housed at least 2000 soldiers. It is just a few miles south of Badbury Rings close to the modern town of Wimborne Minster.

Badbury Rings has a geological capping of ovoid pebbles, perfect as sling-shot ammunition but apparently not good enough. This one was made from baked clay. Presumably made to the perfect weight and size to hit the desired target. We found it against the inner rampart of Badbury Rings in 2005

The Durotrigan forces would try to hold the Romans at the river crossing or defend the first stronghold (Badbury) north of the river. Recently an archaeologist watched while ponds were dug on the National Trust land on the north side of the river beside the legionary fortress. Nothing was found..

Evidence of conflict seemed unlikely, perhaps the locals gave in without a fight. Faced with a disciplined fighting force it would make sense…. but back in 1952 a javalin head was found stuck into the chalk beside the Roman temple site at Badbury. Then in 1963 a spearhead from a Roman artillery ballista was found about 500m from the hillfort beside the Beech Avenue. These were just two random finds… until a couple of weeks ago when the metalwork report came back from our excavation in 2000 at the Badbury temple site. Jorn had found among the earlier finds, two iron projectile heads which were typical mid-1st century AD ballista bolts.

The Roman military museum on Hadrian’s wall spear-heads, javalins and ballista projectiles in used by the legions and auxilliaries

Badbury has witnessed many events, these days it’s mostly sheep grazing and picnics but these finds seem to be scattered leftovers, stray finds, perhaps from a desperate struggle for Dorset independence lost almost 2000 years ago.

Chedworth and Sir Ian’s lost archive

Long ago, fresh out of school, I was told by Bill my mentor, that archaeology is an unrepeatable experiment.. you destroy what you uncover and you must record it properly. An excavation is never over until its published. This is the heavy weight of responsibility for all who go out and dig holes through ancient sites.

September 2000, a Roman wall footing from Badbury temple. Finally written up and sent for publication yesterday.

So.. part of my guilt trip is almost over as yesterday I sent the written report for Badbury Temple (dug in 2000!!!!) to Paul for publication. Nancy has sent out and gathered the specialist reports, Maggie has assembled her finds illustrations, I’ve got a drawing to finish this afternoon and then it’s done.

But…what if something happens?

Uncovering and recording Sir Ian Richmond’s excavations of 1958 and 1963 of the early North Range baths, Chedworth.

We dug at Chedworth Roman Villa this summer and essentially were confirming something that was dug back in 1958 but never published. Chedworth’s a bit like that, lots of digs but little has been written up. From 1957-1965 Sir Ian Richmond investigated and re-interpreted Chedworth but he died in 1965 and his knowledge was lost to us.

Where were his excavation notes and drawings? They should be at Oxford University because he was a professor there but this trail seemed to have been followed in the past. I was told that the Bodleian Library only had a few notes.

In preparation for the dig this year, I reread the 1979 guide book.. because it has the best description of the North Range baths. In the introduction was a thank you to the archivist at Oxford for his help. I wrote to Roger, the author, and he told me to contact the Sackler Library.. so I did.

The nice lady on the end of the phone said that I should e-mail Graham. “I suppose you don’t have anything relating to Chedworth and Sir Ian….”

The Bodleian Library, Oxford.

“Certainly, a stuffed box file with drawings and notebooks.. when would you like to visit?”

So on Monday I travelled into one of the world’s heartlands of learning..parked and took a double-decker into the ‘city of dreaming spires’. First to the vast Neo-classical Clarendon Building, where I handed in my form and was issued with a pass card. I had to read aloud a declaration saying that I would not light a fire or take a naked flame into the library… I agreed.

Then down Broad Street, past the Ashmolean and the Institute of Archaeology and round the corner to the Sackler. I pushed open the heavy double doors into the circular vestibule watched over by a porter (bit Harry Potter). Graham met me and swiped my card to give me access to the library. He led me to a desk containing a box file and various brown envelopes. Each one contained wonderful things (quite a personal sense of wonderful). Graham left me for a while and came back with notebooks and rolls of drawings..

Clarendon House, Oxford which issues access cards for the library.

Part of Sir Ian Richmond’s archive within the Sackler Library his and Eve Rutter’s notes in guide bookss from 1924, 1955 and 1963, notebooks, correspondence and drawings.

Just a few hours to make a record of Sir Ian’s archive. This was what I had been hoping for. Here were his thoughts written in the notebooks, comments written in draft guides, and correspondence and manuscripts for articles and reports. The drawings showed plans and sections of his excavations. Very little photography though and there should be other drawings. I must make another trip in the Spring, not only for Chedworth but also to look at his excavation records for the Iron Age hillfort at Hod Hill in Dorset.

The last letter from Chedworth’s custodian Norman Irvine to Sir Ian Richmond to update him on recent excavation work in the North Range (Sackler Library, Oxford University)

This felt like a great discovery and Sir Ian’s records will certainly be a guiding light during our future work at Chedworth.

Arthur, Badon and Badbury

The end of our October walk standing on the inner rampart looking south beside the west entrance.

Each October I lead a walk at Badbury Rings as part of Dorset Archaeology Days. The weather is generally fine, I meet some great people and it’s an opportunity to share the stories of the place.

At the end, we walk up to the top of the rampart, we look out across the hillfort and surrounding landscape and I say.

“Some people believe that the battle of Mount Badon took place here”

blank faces

“But perhaps you know of Arthur. Not the romantic medieval mythical king but the person he’s based on”

Someone smiles “Yes but was he a real person?”.

Badbury Rings looking south with the west entrance and barbican on the right. The 6m square excavation trench was just above the entrance through the inner rampart.

“Well, there are different views. He’s the hero from a time when the Roman legions had withdrawn from Britain and left her citizens to fend for themselves ( many of them thought of themselves as Roman. Britain had been part of the Empire for nearly 400 years)”.

Badbury lies on a hill top at a route centre. It seems to have defended a crossroads on a border. To the east at Christchurch and north near Salisbury have been found Anglo-Saxon pagan warrior burials of 5th-6th century date. To the west at Tolpuddle, around Dorchester and on the Isle of Purbeck, contemporary burials are of Christian type, east-west without grave goods.

Batts Bed field north of Badbury where the Dorchester to London roman road crosses the Bath to Poole Harbour road. The parish boundary hedge that crosses the picture top to bottom may preserve the line of the road to Hod Hill and Ilchester.

The invading Anglo-Saxons were taking the land. Bit by bit the British were being pushed west. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle documents their triumphs but at the end of the 5th century the tide of conquest is halted.

A leader in the west united the British forces and defeated the Anglo-Saxons at Mount Badon. This battle stopped the Saxon advance for about 50 years. Rare scraps of historical evidence survive. Gildas, a British 6th century monk, comments that the battle took place in the year of his birth although he does not mention when that was or name Arthur.

The Welsh Annals do though

“The Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights upon his shoulders and the Britons were the victors”

I particularly like this time (it’s a bit like an end of the world science fiction story). The fading of the old civilisation and the emergence of a new order. The lantern bearers holding back the dark. Traces of history merged with rare archaeological remnants.

…but was the battle in Dorset? Most people don’t think so. Some say it took place in Somerset near Bath on Bathampton Down. Others think it was in Wiltshire near Swindon at a place on the Ridgeway called Liddington Castle close to another Badbury.

The view from Badbury’s west gate across the Roman temple along the Dorchester road to the group of three barrows by the entrance track.

So.. back to last week when we stood on the windswept rampart looking out across the Dorset countryside…

“Nobody had ever recorded an excavation inside Badbury.. so in 2004 we asked for permission to dig a trench. We expected Iron Age occupation and we found it …but above it there was an unexpected floor of rammed chalk and scattered on its surface were scraps of occupation evidence. Fragments of worn late Roman pottery, a spiral bronze ring, a few nails, a worn 4th century coin and patches of charcoal perhaps remains of cooking fires.

Our 6m square excavation against the inner rampart of Badbury Rings. The chalk floor we found covering the Iron Age deposits

Badbury’s population had left when the Roman army arrived in the 1st century. Most of them had probably shifted their homes down to Vindocladia, the small town beside the Stour a mile to the south…then about AD 410 the Empire ended in Britain, the legions left and the world became uncertain. A storm was brewing in the east. The old fortification was re-occupied.

A Late Roman bronze spral ring left on the chalk floor dated to AD 480-520.

We took the charcoal and sent away samples for Radiocarbon dating. All three dates came back as AD 480-520.

We cannot prove that the Battle of Mount Badon took place at Badbury in Dorset and that Arthur was there ..(although all patriotic Dorset people would like it to be true) but we now know that the place was certainly occupied then.

We can stand on the ramparts and imagine… a society on the edge..drawn back to the old secure place guarding the crossroads, people looking towards the threat from the north and the east as though a storm was approaching.

…as it is this evening.

Object of the month – One for ‘Dragons den’

When we find some  things, we find we often say ‘what a good idea’ or ‘see, it’s all been done before’ this months object could be this kind of object. It may also please all the young ones who keep secret diaries that have very tiny keys, usually lost in the first week or the lock is easily picked by curious (or nosey) siblings.

A bronze key ring or rather a finger ring that has a key on it.

It’s the Romans again!  When we were excavating at Badbury Rings, a 15-year-old work experience lad found a Roman ring-key. (see Camping at Badbury post for more on this dig)

Amy, one of our Rural Surveyors tried on the ring. Even though it felt heavy Amy found it was easy to wear and very comfortable.

These kinds of key were used throughout the roman period and were designed to be used as keys. They were for rotary locks and would have been used for caskets and small strong boxes. Some have decoration on them, but many are plain and probably indicates that their primary function was as a key rather than a fashion statement. I have seen a reconstruction of one of these locks and the key for it at the British Museum, so they can work.

Close-up

So there is an idea for someone to get the TV programme Dragons to invest in…unless ‘its all been done before’ 🙂